Today I wanted to share my experience and the things I learned from spending a summer job doing door-to-door sales. More precisely, the influence it had on how I approached conversations with other people in my day-to-day life.
Why door-to-door sales?
I had heard plenty of times that if you were looking for a job that would teach you valuable skills, a sales job was the way to go. People said a sales job could teach you how to communicate better, learn how people work, and deal with rejection, which sounded like very beneficial skills to learn.
So when I saw a sales job that also allowed me to travel to a different city, I took it.
For this job, me and eight other people all traveled to Mainz (Germany) from somewhere in the country and stayed at the house that was rented for us for a couple of weeks. We were going to be advertising a charitable organization and collecting donations for it. So basically, we “sold” the satisfaction that comes from helping people in exchange for a donation.
In the mornings, we would drive to an area we picked out the night before and then split up into groups of two or three. Those groups would then go around ringing the doorbells of all the houses in the neighborhood and talk to the residents to try and convince them to donate money to our good cause. For each person who would donate, we would receive a part of their donation as our commission.
After a while, I found that I wasn’t a huge fan of trying to get people to do something they weren’t excited about doing, but I still learned some useful things. The thing that made the biggest difference was probably just the volume of different people in different circumstances I got exposed to (I was probably talking to anywhere from fifty to a hundred people every day).
Which, of course, also meant that I had my share of peculiar interactions.
Some interesting interactions I had
Here are some especially memorable ones:
I rang one of the doorbells of a larger apartment complex and turned around to look at the park across from it while I was waiting for someone to answer. As per usual, I expected to be talked to through the intercom first. So I was quite surprised when I suddenly heard a voice directly behind me. I turned around and saw a man with a bushy beard who had asked what I wanted.
I told him I was collecting donations for a good cause, one of which was to grant dying people a last wish if possible.
He replied, saying he was a Darwinist and didn’t care about humans or human life and was therefore not interested in supporting projects that helped other people. I was taken quite aback by this statement, but out of curiosity, I replied, “Well, we have a search and rescue dog unit as well.”
That made him think for a moment, but then he shook his head and told me that even though he liked that more, he still wasn’t going to donate anything.
Another time I talked to someone who wanted to know whether it mattered that he only spent part of the year in Germany. I told him that that wasn’t a problem and asked where he was the rest of the time. He explained to me that he spent most of his time on his very own weed farm he ran in California, to which he invited me to come visit if I ever had the chance. I now have his email, and I have to say I am looking forward to a visit very much.
In my last week on the job, I rang a doorbell, and a young guy with a shaved head answered. While I was talking to him, another guy (a little older than the first one) came up from behind the first guy and told him to go back inside.
Second guy (with an equally shaved head) to me: “I know exactly what you’re doing. I used to do the same thing, so don’t even try your tricks on me, they won’t work anyway.”
Me: You used to do what I do?
Him: Yeah, but once I figured out that it’s all a big scam, I wanted no part of it and left. I am now a mendicant monk.
Me: What is a mendicant monk?
Him (angrily): I said, don’t try your tricks on me!
Me: No, seriously, forget about the donations. What is a mendicant monk?
Him: Oh… okay, well, come in then, I’ll show you.
He led me into a room where about ten people were sitting around, some of them in monk’s robes. The room itself was filled with figurines, pictures of what looked like enlightened beings, and other knick-knacks.
On one side of the room, there was a small golden shrine with a woman kneeling before it. With her head down, she was confessing to the things she had done wrong or could have done better.
The others were patiently waiting for their turn to kneel before the shrine and confess. Other than the woman kneeling, no one spoke.
To take all of this in, I sat down and watched whether something else was going to happen. When that seemed unlikely, I got up to leave. The second guy handed me a book they sold, wished me all the best, and guided me back to the entrance.
The main things I learned
There are two main things I took from my time collecting donations.
1. An increased ability to connect and have fun with the people around me. Especially talking to new people is something I am much more comfortable with now.
Before, when talking to people, I used to be in my head a lot, which made me more tense because it directed a lot of my attention towards my self-doubting thoughts. That made it difficult for me to fully relax and let my guard down in conversations.
When I was striking up conversations with strangers all day, I learned more and more that this was something that was in no way unique to me. Other people struggled with the same thing, they were nervous too, and they were struggling with insecurities just like I was. This was very freeing for me to learn, because in some self-centered way, I had assumed that I was the only one who dealt with things like that.
In addition to that, I thought that somehow people could sense it every time I had a self-doubting thought. Which naturally made me even more self-conscious because I now not only had thoughts that made me insecure, I also felt guilty for even having them.
But when it became more and more obvious to me that that was just something I had subconsciously assumed to be the case even though it wasn’t, it made a big difference. People probably have about as much knowledge about what’s going on in my head as I do about what’s going on inside theirs. Which is honestly very little.
Figuring that out helped me to stop thinking I couldn’t have any self-doubting thoughts in my head if I wanted to feel comfortable in an interaction. That has made a big difference for me.
2. People can often really appreciate it when you get them out of the boring routine they are stuck in all day.
I used to think that people wouldn’t appreciate it if I’d engage them with some humor if they weren’t already in an obviously good mood. I thought things like, “No look at him, he is here to do a job, just keep it to the point.”
Especially with people who dealt with other people all day but had only very brief interactions with each person (e.g., receptionists or employees behind the counter in a coffee shop), I didn’t want to be the person who “slowed down” the whole process by saying something more than just, “Hello, yes, thanks bye.”
But I am beginning to learn more and more that that is actually something a lot of people appreciate very much. They are probably bored to death just exchanging the same eight words with each person and would love to be engaged like an actual human being instead of just somebody’s servant. That has at least been my experience. Almost every single time I complimented someone’s shirt or recognized something they did really well, I saw their face light up and got an enthusiastic “Well, thank you!” back. I know that that was always the way I felt when I was on the other side of those interactions. When I was a waiter and somebody actually engaged me, it could make my whole day.
So now I try to pay more attention to people who I am interacting with and to just extend the contact a tad bit more here and there. It might just be that I take my earbuds out of my ear while the person checks my tickets on the train (something I learned from reading Daring Greatly by Dr. Brené Brown) or that I smile when I greet the cashier in the supermarket. It’s usually nothing big, but often it’s the accumulation of a couple little things that make my day.
Maybe they can make yours too.